lots of new footage out
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some people are upset about new cyberspace stages with level design borrowed from SA2 but i love the weird feeling it evokes, having sky rail transposed onto a green hill tileset
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I’m 100% on board with making the levels even more dream-logic than they already are
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Why hasn’t Nights been a playable character in a sonic game yet
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Forces bits in this around 2m30s
I like I’m Here rendered this way a lot. Helps shed some of the obvious Zelda influence
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I have no doubt this game is gonna be awful but I hope it’ll be awful in an interesting way so that you guys will have lots of fun things to say about it.
WHERE"S THE CHAO
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ian flynn does such a good job with the comics, it really is a treat to see him work on the game story proper
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tapping Flynn to do the nuts-and-bolts writing also makes me more confident in Iizuka as a producer/CCO generally. if nothing else this game will have great music and fun writing — it remains to be seen if their other experiments will pan out, but at least they’re making a go at it
this is the most tempered take I can muster after getting unreasonably invested in Knuckles pathos
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this is also a general interview with Ohtani with lots of trivia I don’t know that he’s talked about before
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clips of the switch version are cropping up on youtube and I was surprised to see what happened after the first titan fight: camera zoom inside sonic where we see a being that looks like chaos 0 talking
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If this game is really gonna do big weird things with Sonic Adventure 1 lore… Day one purchase.
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I feel confident I can confirm this based on now-delisted youtube videos I watched last night
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man i looked at spoilers and yeah between the specificity of the character stuff, the flashbacks, and the eggman audio logs this is absolutely like THE LORE GAME. like there are little tie-ins to fuckin riders and team sonic racing.
tails tube, the animation, and the game definitely have the feel of a comic book reboot where you are re-establishing the canon
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the most trivial and weird reference I’ve seen so far is Amy referencing Sticks outside of Boom for the first time
the tone is bracingly sincere. I love it
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it is still extremely funny to me that they put sticks, a chracter from another continuity, in an olympics game and still have basically never mentioned or referenced marine the racoon ever again
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The reason to temper expectations is basically the same as Forces: this is a lower budget game made by ~1/5 as many people as Mario Odyssey and it’s a little thin
Flynn was very candid in this Shacknews interview that Sonic Team had the budget, cast, etc. set before the writing so there’s not the same kind of deep roster you’d have in the comics or older games
That said the tone and characterization are definitely there
and the music, my god
I haven’t listened to any of the music from this game yet, but I’m kind of assuming it’s a mix of Breath of the Wild minimal piano and the standard 00’s Sonic Team buttrock? Please correct me if I’m wrong.
What I’d love most is for Sonic games to go back to R&B, new jack swing, and house music, but that’s never going to happen. I mean, Sonic music in the 90’s was always about chasing the hippest parts of pop music trends, and I suppose the nu metal and rap in SA2 was a way to sort of carry on that approach with an edgier tone. If they were still chasing the cool side of pop, what genres would they even fuck with in 2022? Hyperpop? Aping 100 gecs and Death’s Dynamic Shroud or something? Maybe I’m just too online.
I still think the game should have gone full Kankyo Ongaku and city pop in aesthetic and sound, now THAT would have been hip. Get Yasuaki Shimizu and Haruomi Hosono to collab on the soundtrack, lol.
I should say I haven’t really played a big 3D mainline Sonic game since Heroes, so I am a little out of the loop on the state of the art in Sonic music.
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The uploads I listened to last night were delisted but it’s far more eclectic than that. Ohtani has his finger on the pulse of very-online videogame-adjacent pop music. He runs a lofi hip-hop beats YouTube channel as a hobby.
I didn’t want to “spoil” the soundtrack by description so I deleted my post earlier but there’s definitely a lot of contemporary bedroom production influence, especially for the thirty distinct cyberspace tracks, and some classic arcade Sega feel to others.
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